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Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic Western (or anti-Western) novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House.

The majority of the story follows a teenager referred to only as "the kid," with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans and others in the United States–Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, pleasure, and eventually out of nihilistic habit. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, a physically massive, highly-educated, exceptionally multi-talented member of the gang, depicted as completely bald from head to toe.

Although the novel initially generated only lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since become highly acclaimed and is widely recognized as McCarthy's masterpiece as well as one of the greatest American novels of all time.

Plot
The novel follows an adolescent runaway from Tennessee with a predilection for violence, known only as "the kid," who is introduced as being born during the famous Leonids meteor shower of 1833. In the late 1840s, he first encounters an enormous and completely hairless character, Judge Holden, at a religious revival in Nacogdoches, Texas. There, Holden shows his dark nature by falsely accusing a preacher of raping both a young girl and a goat, inciting those attending the revival to physically attack the preacher.

The kid carries on journeying alone on his mule through the plains of eastern Texas, and he spends a night in the shelter of a recluse before arriving in "Bexar". After a violent encounter with a bartender which establishes the kid as a formidable fighter, he joins a party of ill-armed United States Army irregulars, led by a Captain White, on a filibustering mission to claim Mexican land for the United States. Shortly after entering Mexico, they are attacked, and many killed, by a band of Comanche warriors. Arrested in Chihuahua, the kid is set free when his cell neighbor and prior acquaintance from Texas, the earless Louis Toadvine, tells the authorities that the two of them would make useful recruits for the state's newly-hired scalp hunting operation, led by John Joel Glanton.

Toadvine and the kid consequently join Glanton's gang. The bulk of the novel details the gang's conversations and depraved, murderous activities as they travel on horseback throughout the borderlands. The gang encounters a traveling carnival, and, in untranslated Spanish, each of their fortunes is told with Tarot cards. The gang originally contracts with various regional leaders to exterminate Apaches and is given a bounty for each scalp they recover. Before long, however, they murder almost anything in their path, including peaceful agrarian Indians, unprotected Mexican villagers, and even Mexican and American soldiers.

Judge Holden, who re-enters the story as a fellow scalp hunter in the Glanton gang, is presented as a profoundly mysterious and awe-inspiring figure; the others seem to regard him as not quite human. Despite his refined manner and remarkable intellect, the judge often proves to be among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty members of the gang and is strongly implied to prey on children during their travels. According to an ex-priest gang member named Tobin, the Glanton gang first met the judge while fleeing from the onslaught of a much larger group of Apaches. In the middle of the desert, the gang found Holden sitting on an enormous boulder, where he seemed to be waiting for them all. He takes them to an extinct volcano, and improvises gunpowder from natural materials, enough to give them the advantage against their Apache pursuers. When the kid remembers seeing Holden in Nacogdoches, Tobin explains that each man in the gang claims to have met the judge at some point before joining Glanton's gang.

After months of marauding, the gang crosses into the Mexican Cession, where they set up a systematic and brutal robbery operation at a ferry on the Colorado River near Yuma, Arizona. Local Yuma (Quechan) Indians are approached to help the gang wrest control of the ferry from its original owner, but Glanton's gang betrays the natives, using their presence and previously coordinated attack on the ferry as an excuse to seize the ferry's munitions and slaughter the Yuma. Because of the new operators' brutal ways, a group of US Army soldiers sets up a second ferry at a ford upriver to cross—which the Yuma briefly appropriate until their ferryman is decapitated and thrown in the river. Eventually, after the gang had amassed a large fortune through robbing settlers using the ferry, the Yumas suddenly attack the gang and kill most of them including Glanton, though Holden (after fighting off the Yumas using his immense strength to level a howitzer by hand) survives and escapes.

The kid, Toadvine, and Tobin are among the few other survivors who escape into the desert, although the kid takes an arrow in the leg. Heading west together, the kid and Tobin encounter a weaponless and hatless Judge Holden and his accompanying imbecile arriving at a watering-hole. The judge negotiates successfully for Toadvine's hat and unsuccessfully for the kid's pistol, and invites them to share in the 'common' water. The kid and Tobin leave the watering hole and move on through the desert. The next evening at another watering site, they have a surprise-attack shoot-out with the judge, who fires a non-fatal shot to Tobin's neck. The kid shoots the two horses the judge came with. As Tobin and the kid hide among bones near the desert creek, the judge delivers a speech about property rights (regarding the shot horses) and advises the kid to reveal himself. Ignoring this, Tobin and the kid continue their travels, both wounded and much weakened. The judge is following the trail and them, a few miles behind. The next day they slightly side-track off the trail and hide, hoping to let the judge pass them by, and lose their trail. The judge does repeatedly pass by them, quite near and initially unaware; and soon addresses them aloud, knowing they are nearby and hiding. Although the kid has had three easy clear-shot opportunities to shoot the judge as Tobin strongly advises, he doesn't take the shots. The judge and the imbecile then leave. Tobin and the kid are in quite bad shape and would likely have died out in the desert, but some benevolent Indians rescue them and they survive.

Both parties end up in San Diego, but the kid gets separated from Tobin when he is caught by local authorities and imprisoned. Holden visits him in jail, stating that he told the jailers "the truth": that the kid alone was responsible for the end of the Glanton gang. The kid declares that the judge was responsible for the gang's evils, but the judge denies it. After reaching through the cell bars to try to touch the kid, Holden leaves the kid alone, stating that he "has errands." The kid is released and seeks a doctor to treat his wound. Under the influence of medicinal ether, he hallucinates that the judge is visiting him, along with a curious man who forges coins. The kid recovers and seeks out Tobin, with no luck. He makes his way to Los Angeles, where he witnesses the executions of Toadvine and David Brown—leaving now only Tobin, whose fate is uncertain, the judge, and the kid.

The kid again wanders across the American West. In 1878, he makes his way to Fort Griffin, Texas and is now referred to by the author as "the man." The lawless city is a center for processing the remains of the American bison, which have been hunted nearly to extinction. At a saloon, where a traveling roadshow performs with a trained dancing bear, the man yet again meets the judge, who does not seem to have aged in the intervening years. Holden calls the man "the last of the true," and the pair talk on equal terms. Holden describes the man as a disappointment, stating that the man held in his heart "clemency for the heathen." Holden declares prophetically that the man has arrived at the saloon for "the dance." A drunk man shoots the dancing bear, and the man tells the judge, "You ain't nothin'," and, noting the dead bear, says that "even a dumb animal can dance."

The man hires a prostitute, then afterward goes to an outhouse under another meteor shower. In the outhouse, he is surprised by the naked judge there waiting for him, who "gather[s] him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh." This is the last mention of the man. As two men from the saloon approach the outhouse, another man admonishes them not to open the door. They do so anyway, and gaze in awed horror at what they see, stating only, "Good God almighty." The last paragraph finds the judge back in the saloon, dancing in the nude and playing fiddle wildly among the drunkards and prostitutes, claiming that he never sleeps, and will never die.

A brief epilogue features an unspecified person augering a row of holes across the prairie. The worker sparks a fire in each of the holes while an assortment of passionless wanderers crosses the row. The line of holes is described as "a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie."

Major characters

 * The kid: The novel's anti-heroic protagonist, the kid is a Tennessean initially in his mid-teens whose mother died in childbirth and who flees from his father to Texas. He is said to have a disposition for bloodshed and is involved in many vicious actions early on; he takes up inherently violent professions, specifically being recruited by murderers including Captain White, and later, by Glanton and his gang, to secure release from a prison in Chihuahua, Mexico. The kid takes part in many of the Glanton gang's scalp-hunting rampages, but gradually displays a moral fiber that ultimately puts him at odds with the Judge. "The kid" is later, as an adult, referred to as "the man," when he encounters the judge again after nearly three decades.
 * Judge Holden, or "the judge": An enormous, pale, and hairless man, who often seems almost mythical or supernatural. Possessing peerless knowledge and talent in everything from dance to legal argument, Holden is a dedicated examiner and recorder of the natural world and a supremely violent and perverted character. He rides with (though largely does not interact with) Glanton's gang after they find him sitting on a rock in the middle of the desert and he saves them from an Apache attack using his exceptional intellect, skill, and nearly superhuman strength. It is hinted at that he and Glanton have forged some manner of a pact, possibly for the very lives of the gang members. He gradually becomes the antagonist to the kid after the dissolution of Glanton's gang, occasionally having brief reunions with the kid to mock, debate, or terrorize him. Unlike the rest of the gang, Holden is socially refined and remarkably well-educated; however, he perceives the world as ultimately violent, fatalistic, and liable to an endless cycle of bloody conquest, with human nature and autonomy defined by the will to violence; he asserts, ultimately, that "War is god."
 * Louis Toadvine: A seasoned outlaw the kid originally encounters in a vicious brawl and who then burns down a hotel, Toadvine is distinguished by his head which has no ears and his forehead branded with the letters H, T, (standing for "horse thief") and F. He later reappears unexpectedly as a cellmate of the kid in the Chihuahua prison. Here, he somewhat befriends the kid, negotiating his and the kid's release in return for joining Glanton's gang, to whom he claims dishonestly that he and the kid are experienced scalp hunters. Toadvine is not as depraved as the rest of the gang and opposes the judge's methods ineffectually, but is still a violent individual himself. He is hanged in Los Angeles alongside David Brown.

Other recurring characters

 * Captain White, or "the captain": An ex-professional soldier and American supremacist who believes that Mexico is a lawless nation destined to be conquered by the United States, Captain White leads a ragtag group of militants into Mexico. The kid joins Captain White's escapades before his capture and imprisonment; he later discovers that White has been decapitated by his enemies.
 * John Joel Glanton, or simply Glanton: Glanton is the American leader (sometimes deemed "captain") of a band of scalphunters who murder Indians as well as Mexican civilians and militants alike. His history and appearance are not clarified, except that he is physically small with black hair and has a wife and child in Texas though he has been banned from returning there because of his criminal record. A clever strategist, his last major action is to seize control of a profitable Colorado River ferry, which leads him and most of his gang to be killed in an ambush by Yuma Indians.
 * Tobin, or "the ex-priest": A former novice of the Society of Jesus, Tobin instead turns to a life of crime in Glanton's gang, though remains deeply religious. He feels an apparently friend-like bond with the kid and abhors the judge and his philosophy; he and the judge gradually become great spiritual enemies. Although he survives the Yuma massacre of Glanton's gang, during his escape in the desert he is shot in the neck by the judge and seeks medical attention in San Diego. His ultimate fate, however, remains unknown.
 * David Brown: An especially radical member of the Glanton band, David Brown becomes known for his dramatic displays of violence. He wears a necklace of human ears (similar to the one worn by Bathcat before his immolation). He is arrested in San Diego and sought out by Glanton personally, who seems especially concerned to see him freed (though Brown ends up securing his own release). Though he survives the Yuma massacre, he is captured with Toadvine in Los Angeles and both are hanged.
 * John Jackson: "John Jackson" is a name shared by two men in Glanton's gang— one black, one white— who detest one another and whose tensions frequently rise when in each other's presence. After trying to drive the black Jackson away from a campfire with a racist remark, the white one is decapitated by the black one; the black Jackson later becomes the first person murdered in the Yuma massacre.

Violence
A major theme is the warlike nature of man. A show of violence early in the novel consists of the antagonist getting clubbed in the head. Critic Harold Bloom describes the novel as "worthy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick," but admitted that he found the book's pervasive violence so shocking that he had several false starts before reading the book entirely. Caryn James argued that the novel's violence was a "slap in the face" to modern readers cut off from the brutality of life, while Terrence Morgan thought that, though initially shocking, the effect of the violence gradually waned until the reader was bored. Billy J. Stratton contends that the brutality depicted is the primary mechanism through which McCarthy challenges binaries and promotes his revisionist agenda. James D. Lilley argues that many critics struggle with the fact that McCarthy does not use violence for "jury-rigged, symbolic plot resolutions . . . In McCarthy's work, violence tends to be just that; it is not a sign or symbol of something else."

Epigraphs and ending
Three epigraphs open the book: quotations from French writer Paul Valéry, from German Christian mystic Jacob Boehme, and a 1982 news clipping from the Yuma Sun reporting the claim of members of an Ethiopian archeological excavation that a fossilized skull three hundred millennia old seemed to have been scalped. The themes implied by the epigraphs have been variously discussed without specific conclusions.

As noted above concerning the ending, the most common interpretation of the novel is that Holden kills the kid in a Fort Griffin, Texas, outhouse. The fact that the kid's death is not depicted might be significant. Blood Meridian is a catalog of brutality, depicting, in sometimes explicit detail, all manner of violence, bloodshed, brutality and cruelty. For the dramatic climax to be left undepicted leaves something of a vacuum for the reader: knowing full well the horrors established in the past hundreds of pages, the kid's unstated fate might still be too awful to describe, and too much for the mind to fathom: the sight of the kid's fate leaves several witnesses stunned almost to silence; never in the book does any other character have this response to violence, again underlining the singularity of the kid's fate.

Patrick W. Shaw argues that Holden has sexually violated the protagonist. As Shaw writes, the novel had several times earlier established "a sequence of events that gives us ample information to visualize how Holden molests a child, then silences him with aggression." According to Shaw's argument, Holden's actions in the Fort Griffin outhouse are the culmination of what he desired decades earlier: to rape the kid, then perhaps kill him to silence the only survivor of the Glanton gang. If the judge wanted only to kill the kid, there would be no need for him to undress as he waited in the outhouse.

Yet Shaw’s effort to penetrate the mystery in the jakes has not managed to satisfy other critics, who have rejected his thesis as more sensational than textual: "The judge gives one the impression, not so much of male potency, but of impotence. His mountainous, hairless flesh is more that of a eunuch than a man. Having suggested paedophilia, Shaw then goes back to read other episodes in terms of the judge's paedophilia:  the hypothesis thus becomes the premise."

- Peter J. Kitson (Ed.) Kitson offers that these hypotheses and discussions validate the notion that Blood Meridian is a text that cannot be known.

Gnosticism
Various discussions by Leo Daugherty, Barclay Owens, Harold Bloom and others, have resulted from the second epigraph of the three which are used by the author to introduce the novel taken from the "Gnostic" mystic Jacob Boehme. The quote from Boehme reads as follows: "It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness." No specific conclusions have been reached concerning its interpretation and the extent of its direct or indirect relevance to the novel.

These critics agree that there are Gnostic elements present in Blood Meridian, but they disagree on the precise meaning and implication of those elements. One of the most detailed of these arguments is made by Leo Daugherty in his 1992 article, "Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy." Daugherty argues "Gnostic thought is central to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian" (Daugherty, 122); specifically, the Persian-Zoroastrian-Manichean branch of Gnosticism. He describes the novel as a "rare coupling of Gnostic 'ideology' with the 'affect' of Hellenic tragedy by means of depicting how power works in the making and erasing of culture, and of what the human condition amounts to when a person opposes that power and thence gets introduced to fate."

Daugherty sees Holden as an archon, and the kid as a "failed pneuma." Daugherty makes the interpretive claim that the kid feels a "spark of the alien divine." Furthermore, the kid rarely initiates violence, usually doing so only when urged by others or in self-defense. Holden, however, speaks of his desire to dominate the earth and all who dwell on it, by any means: from outright violence to deception and trickery. He expresses his wish to become a "suzerain," one who "rules even when there are other rulers" and whose power overrides all others'. In 2009, Bloom did refer to Boehme in the context of Blood Meridian as, "a very specific type of Kabbalistic Gnostic".

Daugherty contends that the staggering violence of the novel can best be understood through a Gnostic lens. "Evil" as defined by the Gnostics was a far larger, more pervasive presence in human life than the rather tame and "domesticated" Satan of Christianity. As Daugherty writes, "For [Gnostics], evil was simply everything that is, with the exception of bits of spirit imprisoned here. And what they saw is what we see in the world of Blood Meridian." Barcley Owens argues that, while there are undoubtedly Gnostic qualities to the novel, Daugherty's arguments are "ultimately unsuccessful," because Daugherty fails to address the novel's pervasive violence adequately and because he overstates the kid's goodness.

Theodicy
Another major theme concerning Blood Meridian involves the subject of theodicy. Theodicy in general refers to the issue of the philosophical or theological attempt to justify the existence of that which is metaphysically or philosophically good in a world which contains so much apparent and manifest evil. Douglas Canfield in his essay "Theodicy in Blood Meridian" (in his book Mavericks on the Border, 2001, Lexington University Press) asserts that theodicy is the central theme of Blood Meridian. James Wood in his essay for The New Yorker entitled "Red Planet" from 2005 took a similar position to this in recognizing the issue of the general justification of metaphysical goodness in the presence of evil in the world as a recurrent theme in the novel. This was directly supported by Edwin Turner on 28 September 2010 in his essay on Blood Meridian for Biblioklept. Chris Dacus in the Cormac McCarthy Journal for 2009 wrote the essay entitled, "The West as Symbol of the Eschaton in Cormac McCarthy," where he expressed his preference for discussing the theme of theodicy in its eschatological terms in comparison to the theological scene of the last judgment. This preference for reading theodicy as an eschatological theme was further affirmed by Harold Bloom in his recurrent phrase of referring to the novel as "The Authentic Apocalyptic Novel."

Background
McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian while living on the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellows grant. It is his first novel set in the Southwestern United States, a change from the Appalachian settings of his earlier work. In his essay for the Slate Book Review from 5 October 2012 entitled "Cormac McCarthy Cuts to the Bone", Noah Shannon summarizes the existing library archives of the first drafts of the novel as dating to the mid-1970s. The review includes digital archive images of several of McCarthy's own type-script pages for early versions of the novel.

McCarthy conducted considerable research to write the book. Critics have repeatedly demonstrated that even brief and seemingly inconsequential passages of Blood Meridian rely on historical evidence. The Glanton gang segments are based on Samuel Chamberlain's account of the group in his memoir My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue, which he wrote during the latter part of his life. Chamberlain rode with John Joel Glanton and his company between 1849 and 1850. The novel's antagonist Judge Holden appeared in Chamberlain's account, but his true identity remains a mystery. Chamberlain does not appear in the novel.

Style
Describing events of extreme violence, McCarthy's prose is sparse, yet expansive, with an often biblical quality and frequent religious references. McCarthy's writing style involves many unusual or archaic words, no quotation marks for dialogue, and no apostrophes to signal most contractions.

Reception
While Blood Meridian initially received little recognition, it has since been recognized as McCarthy's masterpiece, and one of the greatest works of American literature. American literary critic Harold Bloom praised Blood Meridian as one of the 20th century's finest novels. Time magazine included the novel in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005".

Aleksandar Hemon has called Blood Meridian "possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years." In 2006, The New York Times conducted a poll of writers and critics regarding the most important works in American fiction from the previous 25 years; Blood Meridian was a runner-up, along with John Updike's four novels about Rabbit Angstrom and Don DeLillo's Underworld while Toni Morrison's Beloved topped the list. Novelist David Foster Wallace named Blood Meridian one of the five most underappreciated American novels since 1960 and described it as "[p]robably the most horrifying book of this century, at least [in] fiction."

Literary significance
Academics and critics have variously suggested that Blood Meridian is nihilistic or strongly moral; a satire of the western genre, a savage indictment of Manifest Destiny. Harold Bloom called it "the ultimate western;" J. Douglas Canfield described it as "a grotesque Bildungsroman in which we are denied access to the protagonist's consciousness almost entirely." Comparisons have been made to the work of Hieronymus Bosch and Sam Peckinpah, and of Dante Alighieri and Louis L'Amour. However, there is no consensus interpretation; James D. Lilley writes that the work "seems designed to elude interpretation." After reading Blood Meridian, Richard Selzer declared that McCarthy "is a genius--also probably somewhat insane." Critic Steven Shaviro wrote:

"In the entire range of American literature, only Moby-Dick bears comparison to Blood Meridian. Both are epic in scope, cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness. Both manifest a sublime visionary power that is matched only by still more ferocious irony. Both savagely explode the American dream of manifest destiny [sic] of racial domination and endless imperial expansion. But if anything, McCarthy writes with a yet more terrible clarity than does Melville."

- Steven Shaviro

Attempted film adaptations
There have been a number of attempts to create a motion picture adaptation of Blood Meridian. However, all have failed during the development or pre-production stages. A common perception is that the story is "unfilmable", due to its unrelenting violence and dark tone. In an interview with Cormac McCarthy by The Wall Street Journal in 2009, McCarthy denied this notion, with his perspective being that it would be "very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary."

Screenwriter Steve Tesich first adapted Blood Meridian into a screenplay in 1995. In the late 1990s, Tommy Lee Jones acquired the film adaptation rights to the story and subsequently rewrote Tesich's screenplay, with the idea of directing and playing a role in it. Due to film studios avoiding the project's overall violence, production could not move forward.

Following the end of production for Kingdom of Heaven in 2004, screenwriter William Monahan and director Ridley Scott entered discussions with producer Scott Rudin for adapting Blood Meridian with Paramount Pictures financing. In an interview with Eclipse Magazine published in June 2008, Scott confirmed that the screenplay had been written, but that the extensive violence was proving to be a challenge for film standards. This later led to Scott and Monhan leaving the project, resulting in another abandoned adaptation.

By early 2011, James Franco was thinking of adapting Blood Meridian, along with a number of other William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy novels. After being persuaded by Andrew Dominik to adapt the novel, Franco shot twenty-five minutes of test footage, starring Scott Glenn, Mark Pellegrino, Luke Perry and Dave Franco. For undisclosed reasons, Rudin denied further production of the film. On May 5, 2016, Variety revealed that Franco was negotiating with Rudin to write and direct an adaptation to be brought to the Marché du Film, with Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan and Vincent D'Onofrio starring. However, later that day, it was reported that the project dissolved, due to issues concerning the film rights.

Lynne Ramsay has expressed an interest in adapting the novel.